[分享] 乔布斯妹妹Mona Simpson在其追思会上的颂词（全文翻译）

毒手药王邓智先

[分享] 乔布斯妹妹Mona Simpson在其追思会上的颂词（全文翻译）



原文：Mona Simpson
     Mona Simpson是小说家，加州大学洛杉矶分校的英国文学教授，Steve Jobs 的妹妹，10月16日，她在斯坦福大学大教堂举办的Steve Jobs的追思会上，为自己的哥哥作了以上的颂词。10月30日，纽约时报（New York Times）全文刊登了这篇文字。
翻译：心路独舞
      译者注：这篇颂词讲述了兄妹重新团圆的经过，同时详细叙述了乔布斯生命最后的一些时光，初看都是一些琐碎的点滴，读起来却深情感人，有几次我几乎潸然泪下，纵然很长，我还是抽空提笔将其译成了中文。
译文：
      小时候，我一直是一个独生女，跟着单身母亲长大。我们很贫穷，因为我的父亲是叙利亚移民，我一直想象着他长得或许像埃及著名演员奧瑪·雪瑞夫，我希望他富有和善良，能够回到我们的生活里（但不是我们那家徒四壁的公寓）来帮助我们。多年以后，我见到了我的父亲，我试图欺骗性地说服自己，他只是换了电话号码、忘了留给我们新的地址，因为他是理想的革命主义者，为着阿拉伯人的新生活奋斗。
      即使作为一个女权运动者，我的一生都企盼着一个男人的爱，很多年里，我错误地以为这个男人是我的父亲，当我25岁的时候，我终于遇到了这个爱我的男人，他是我的哥哥。
      那时候，我住在纽约，正在试图写出我一生中的第一本小说。我为一个很小的杂志社工作，办公室只有一个储藏间的大小，却要和其他三个充满激情的作家合用。那时候，我不过是一个来自加利福尼亚中产阶级家庭的姑娘，整天缠着我的老板给我们买健康保险，有一天，我接到了一个律师的电话，说他的客户是一个富有和著名的人，这个人是我长期失散的哥哥，杂志社所有的编辑激动得都疯狂了。那是1985年，我们的杂志社属于边缘文学的那种，但是我却更喜欢狄更斯的经典小说。由于律师拒绝说出我哥哥的姓名，我的同行们开始打赌，第一个候选人是John Travolta （美国著名演员，译者注），私下里，我希望他是Henry James （美国著名作家，译者注）的后代，比我有天赋，不需努力便很杰出。
      等我见到史蒂夫，他看起来和我一样的年纪，穿着牛仔裤，模样有点像阿拉伯或者犹太人，但比奧瑪·雪瑞夫要好看多了。
      我们一起散了很久的步，我们好像不约而同地决定去散步，我已经记不得我们第一天一起说了什么，只是觉得他生来就像我的朋友，他说他做计算机工作。
      我对计算机知道不多，那时我使用的尚还是一个老式的打字机。
      我告诉我哥哥说，最近我打算买我一生中的第一台计算机，一个叫做Cromemco的东西。
      史蒂夫建议我最好等等，他说他正在设计一个“更美的东西”。
      我想告诉你的是，在认识史蒂夫的27年里，在他生命的三个阶段中，我从他那里学到的东西：有关生命、有关疾病、有关死亡。
      史蒂夫只作他热爱的事情，他干起事情来不要命，几乎天天如此。
      这是很简单的事实。
      他是三心二意的反面。
      他从不因为努力工作而不好意思，即使最终的结果是失败，如果像史蒂夫这样聪明的人都不怕努力或者失败，也许我也不必。
      他被排挤出Apple 的那段时间是很痛苦的，他告诉我硅谷的五百多个公司巨头曾被邀请与当时的总统共进晚餐，他却没被邀请的事情。
      感情上他很受伤害，但是第二天还是坚持去上班，就像以后，天天如此。
      创新不是史蒂夫的最高信条，他最崇信的是美。
      作为一个创造者，史蒂夫又是极其忠诚的一个人，如果他喜欢某件衬衫，他会订购十件或者一百件，在加州他Palo Alto家里，大约有足够数量的黑色全棉高领衫，可以给现在教堂在座所有的人每个人一件。
      他不崇尚潮流和噱头，他喜欢自己的同龄人。
      他对美的哲学，让我想起了一个谚语：“流行现在看起来可能很美，但不久以后会很丑陋；而艺术可能初看不怎么样，但却越看越美。”
      史蒂夫总在致力于美到最后。
      尽管没人要求他，他还是开着第三代或者第四代同样黑色的跑车每天到“Next”去，在那里，他和他的团队，正静静地开发着后来Tim Berners-Lee给全世界网络所写的程序的平台。
      说起爱情来，史蒂夫像个女人，他最崇尚爱，这是他至高无上的神，他跟踪并为每一个和他一起工作的人爱情生活操心。
      每次他碰到一个女人可能喜欢的男人，他会问：“ 你单身吗？想不想和我妹妹共进晚餐？”
      我记得他遇到劳伦的那天打电话给我说：“这个美丽的女人，非常聪明，她有只狗，有一天我会和她结婚。”
      Reed出生时，他开始变得滔滔不绝起来，此后再也没有停下来，对每一个孩子来说，他都亲力亲为，担心Lisa的男朋友、Erin的旅行和裙子的长度，担心Eve骑马的安全。
      参加过Reed毕业典礼的每一个人，永远都不会忘记Reed和史蒂夫跳慢步舞的情景。
      他对劳伦毫无保留的爱，贯穿一生，他坚信爱情随时随地都在发生，在这一点上，他从不讥讽、不愤世嫉俗、也不悲观，我始终在向他学习这一点。
      史蒂夫年轻时便成功，他觉得这让他与世隔绝，从我认识他起，他多数的选择是为了融化周围隔离着他的这堵“墙”，一个来自Los Alto中产阶级的男孩儿，和来自新泽西中产阶级家庭的女孩儿相爱，对他们来讲，能够抚养Lisa, Reed, Erin，和 Eve一起长大成为脚踏实地、正常的孩子，是最重要的一件事情。他们的房子并不显赫，也没有充斥着昂贵的艺术品和装饰，在我认识史蒂夫和劳伦的最初几年里，晚饭都是在草地上吃的，常常只有一种蔬菜，很多很多的这种蔬菜：简单烹制的西兰花，只有在最近，才加上了草本植物。
      即使是百万富翁，史蒂夫也总是亲自在机场接我，他就站在那里等待，穿着牛仔裤。
      当有孩子给他公司打电话时，他的秘书总是说：“你的父亲在开会，要我打断他么？”
      当Reed坚持每一个万圣节都装扮成巫师的时候，史蒂夫、劳伦、Erin 和Eve全部开始迷信巫术。
      他们有一年开始装修厨房，结果进行了很多年，其间，他们在车库的一个加热台上做饭，同期建筑的Pixar大厦（著名的电影公司，乔布斯当时拥有，译者注），不过只用了一半的时间。这便是Palo Alto房子装修的全部，浴室还是旧的，但有一点是不同的，作为起点，这是一幢很好的房子，史蒂夫一下子看到了这一点。
      这并不是说，他不享受自己的成功，实际上，他十分自豪自己的成功，他曾经兴奋地告诉我，在Palo Alto最好的自行车店里，他惊喜地发现自己买得起那里最好的赛车。
      事实上，他的确买了。
      史蒂夫也很谦虚，他坚持不断地学习。
      有一次他和我说，如果他在不同的环境下长大，也许会成为一个数学家。他特别喜欢大学，喜欢在斯坦福大学校园散步，在他去世前的几年里，他研究了Mark Rothko有关绘画的书籍，他以前没听说过这个艺术家，他在考虑将来在Apple校园的墙上装饰什么来激励那里的人们。
      史蒂夫有很多鬼点子，这世上还有哪个CEO像他那样懂英国史、中国茶花、并最喜欢David Austin玫瑰？
      他的口袋里常常有各种令人惊讶的东西，即使在20多年亲蜜婚姻生活的以后，劳伦常常还会在那里发现一些惊喜：他喜欢的歌曲，剪下的诗歌等。我和他每两天左右通一次电话，但我打开纽约时报看到公司专利的专题的时候，我有时会惊奇地发现那里有他那完美楼梯的图案。
      和他的妻子、四个孩子在一起，史蒂夫其乐无穷。
      他珍惜幸福。
      然后他病了，我们看到他的生活被压缩成一个小圈子，他曾经喜欢在巴黎漫步，他曾经喜欢在东京造访一个小手工荞面店，他喜欢滑雪，但是他再也不能…
      到了最后，甚至简单的快乐，比如一个桃子…
      但是，在他的疾病里，令我惊奇地学到的，不是他被剥夺了什么，而是还有那么多留下的。
      我记得我哥哥肝移植后借助椅子重新学习走路，每天一次，他会撑起细瘦的两条腿，看起来已经支撑不起他的身体，双臂撑着椅子背，推着椅子穿过Memphis医院的走廊，走到护士工作站，然后坐在椅子上，休息一下，再走回去。每天，他数着自己的步子，每天，他向前推进一点…
      劳伦跪下来，凝视着他的眼睛说：“史蒂夫，你做得到”。他的眼睛马上睁大了，咬紧双唇。
      他继续努力，他总在努力，爱情是他永远的动力，他是一个充满感情的男人。
      我知道，在那些恐怖的日子里，史蒂夫并不是为自己忍受着这些痛苦，他为了家人设定着自己的既定目标：儿子Reed高中毕业，女儿Erin东京之行，他设计并计划带全家周游世界的游艇下水，他和劳伦计划退休居住的游艇。
      即使病了，他始终保持着自己的品味、喜好和判断。他见过67个护士，最后选择了三个Tracy，Arturo和 Elham，她们陪伴着他走到生命的最后。
      有一次，他感染了严重的肺炎，医生禁止所有的东西，包括冰，我们呆在一个标准的ICU病房，一般情况下，史蒂夫不喜欢报出自己的名字搞特殊，但这一次他坦承，他愿意被特殊对待一回。
      我告诉他：这治疗本身就很特殊的。
      他向我凑过身来说：我要更特殊一点。
      插管时，无法说话，他要了一本信笺纸，在医院的病床上画出了iPad支架的设计草图，他设计了新型的流线型屏幕和X光机，他重新勾勒了那个“并不特殊”的病房，每一次他的妻子走进房间，我看见他的脸上马上浮现了笑容。
      在大事上，你必须相信我，他在信笺纸上写道。他尊重的事情，你也必须。
      其实，他的意思只是：我们必须背着医生，给他一块儿冰。
      所有的人都不知道他会活多久，即使在他最后的一年里，在他状况较好的时候，他会启动一些项目给Apple的同事去完成，荷兰的造船师正准备在一个完美的不锈钢船体上装饰上木头，三个女儿尚未结婚，两个最小的还是孩子，他想亲自陪他们走下结婚的通道，就像他在我的婚礼上一样。
      最后，我们都会死去，死在媒体之中，死在故事中间，死在很多的故事中间。我想，一个得了很多年癌症的人死去，用“意外”这个词是不准确的，但对史蒂夫的死亡，我们却是意外的。
      我从我哥哥的死亡中学到的是：他过去是怎么样的，他便怎么样面对死亡。
      周二上午他给我打电话，让我马上赶到Palo Alto，他的声音充满感情，但是有些不胜重负，他正在走向他的死亡之旅，尽管，他非常、非常不愿意离开我们。
      他开始和我道别，我阻止了他，我说：等等，让我赶来，我在去机场的出租车上，我很快会在那里。
      他说：亲爱的，我要告别是因为我怕你可能来不及赶到了。
      当我到达的时候，他和劳伦像情人一样相拥着，同时紧紧地地凝视孩子们的眼睛。
      下午两点以前，他的妻子还能叫醒他，和Apple的朋友说话。
      以后，他不再能够醒来。
      他的呼吸变得挣扎、沉重、费力，我感觉他又在数着自己脚步，一步一步地推向更远…
       这是我从他那里学到的，我想他也正在认真学习这一点：死亡不是发生在他身上的，他要征服它。
      在和我的告别中他说，他很抱歉，不能像曾经计划的那样一起变老，他将要去一个更好的地方。
      Fisher医生说，他只有一半的机会活过那个晚上。
      他当然坚持过了那个晚上，劳伦睡在他身旁，每当他呼吸间隔长一点，她便跳起来检查他，然后她和我互相注视着，如释重负般深深地吐出一口气，重新开始下一轮…
      即使到了这一步，他还是坚持，即使最后一步也要绝对浪漫，他的呼吸预示着一个热忱的旅程、某些陡峭的途径、某种高度。
      他似乎在爬坡。
      但是以他的意志力、工作原则、和韧性，还有他对神奇的向往、对完美的艺术信仰，似乎应该还有更美的后来的…
      几个小时前，史蒂夫最后的话语，都是单音节的，重复三次。
      在开口前，他先看着妹妹Patty，然后长久地注视着他的孩子们，最后是妻子劳伦，然后视线越过他们的肩膀，他最后的话是：
      OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
原文：
I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.
Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James —someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.
We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Everyday.
That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”
I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene.“There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.
His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical,never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erinand Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered,“Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But— and this was a crucial distinction —it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’ strip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held .He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.
None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.
What I learned from my brother’s death was that characteristic essential: What he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

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